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Archive for May, 2017

Last Saturday, I flew off to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, another ex-Soviet country in the Caucasus. I had not planned to go there at all, but a fellow grad student invited me to visit. Rebecca and I had shared an apartment at a University of Illinois summer research session. Rebecca saw that I had been in Armenia and invited me to Azerbaijan. Curious, I checked the visa requirements and saw that they had just changed as of January for American citizens. There is now a fast, electronic visa that is ordered online for a total cost of about $25.00. I applied for my visa late on a Thursday night and got the visa via email around noon the next day.

Flying in to Baku over the Caspian.

The flight to Baku was uneventful. The only news to report is that I’ve been flying frequently enough that I’m repeating Aeroflot planes. I was on a Boeing 737 in the name of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which was the same plane that I flew to Yerevan on. One thing of note did happen on the flight, which was a slightly different safety demonstration. As a good chunk of the flight crosses the Caspian Sea, the flight crew had to break out the lifejackets to demonstrate how to wear and use them in the event of a water landing. Sadly, the lifejackets do not have winged hammer and sickles on them. Flying into Baku over the Caspian was a real treat. We landed slightly late as there was some sort of medical incident with a passenger while we boarded, but it was all ok in the end. I passed customs without any problems, though the guy did stamp my passport right next to the Armenia stamp. Thankfully, he didn’t ask me anything about my trip to Armenia.

After crossing customs, I was met outside the airport by Rebecca and we hopped in a cab to her apartment in the center of the city. Interestingly, a lot of the cabs in Baku are the same ones as the London taxis, though they are left-hand drive. Thankfully, Azerbaijan carries in the car traditions of the other Caucasian republics. There were a lot of 1990s Mercedes on the roads, especially W201s, W202s, and W210s.

Just a few Mercedes.

We popped into Rebecca’s apartment to drop off my stuff. We then walked to one of the main pedestrian areas of Baku, Fountain Square, to see the fountains and meander our way towards the waterfront park. Along the way, we kept running into barriers that are being erected for the Baku Formula 1 Grand Prix, which will be taking place in a few months. I didn’t realize that Baku hosted F1 events. Similar to the Monaco Grand Prix, the race takes place on the actual roads of the city and not at a race track. Apparently, there are special paving materials that they can put down to cover some of the cobblestone roads, which can easily be removed after the race to restore the charm of the old city streets.

Stands and barriers going up for the race.

The waterfront is spectacular, and immediately highlights Baku’s claim to fame. Baku is a major site of oil production. Many American and European fortunes were made there prior to the Bolshevik takeover in the early 1920s, and around the turn of the century, Baku produced about half of the world’s oil. It was particularly interesting to travel to Baku immediately after Volgograd. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa was a three pronged attack. One group of soldiers worked north with the goal of Leningrad, one more to the middle towards Moscow, and a third group down to Stalingrad (Volgograd). Stalingrad was to be a double target for both propaganda and tactical reasons. One major goal was to conquer the city named in honor of the Soviet leader (one reason why Stalin ordered the Red Army not one step backward). The other major reason was that Stalingrad was a major port city on the Volga River, which would allow access down to the Caspian and to Baku and its oil reserves. And what an oil city Baku is. The coastline smelled of crude oil, which is extracted both from the grounds of the city and from offshore rigs. There was even some oil floating on the water of the Caspian.

The main drag along the water.

From the waterfront, we walked over to the Funicular, and rode that to the hill overlooking Baku (Soviet city planning at its best, having a funicular or gondola to a hill overlooking the city, which has an imposing TV tower on it). While riding up, it started to rain heavily, which is very rare for Baku. There was even some thunder and lightning. We stood under cover for a while before venturing out into the rain. We walked along a series of graves for people considered to be Azerbaijani martyrs. They died in the tensions and clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan and between Azerbaijan and the Soviets during the end of the Soviet Union. At this hilltop park, there is a great overview of the whole city and the Caspian. We also walked near the base of the Flame Towers, the architectural symbols of Baku. There was no easy way to cross the road to the base of the Flame Towers, so we gave up and walked down the hill and back to the center to get dinner. We had some decent Mexican food before calling it a night.

Panorama from the top.

The next morning, we got up and walked to the Old City, which is as the name suggests, the old part of the city. The narrow, winding roads and architecture made it feel like we were in another world. While there, we climbed the Maiden Tower, and then wandered around the Palace of the Shirvanshahs museum. The old architecture was fascinating. We then walked back to the Fountain Square area for lunch before taking yet another adventure. We hopped on a regular bus and rode about 30 minutes out of the center to see a beach and the oil fields. I was excited to go see the fields because it’s where they filmed the 1999 Pierce Brosnan James Bond film “The World is Not Enough.” Immediately after the main city limits, there are fields of oil derricks pumping away, and it was pretty interesting to see them still working. They were apparently built in the 1930s and continue to pump to this day.

The “James Bond” oil fields.

Getting to the derricks and the offshore platform was easier said than done. We got off of the bus at the correct stop, but there was no way to cross the road. We walked in one direction and didn’t see a place to cross, so we walked in the other direction only to see an unending stretch of road. As we didn’t want to run across a few lanes of highway speed traffic, we got into a cab that was parked on the side of the road and had him loop us around a roundabout and drop us off at the beach by the offshore platform. Apparently, the first offshore oil platform was built in Baku. We saw some people fishing in the Caspian and some swimming. Rebecca put a foot in, and I waded in the waters a little bit. Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea as when I came out, there was definitely some oil residue on my feet.

Touch waters of the Caspian: check.

We took the bus back to the center, grabbed some caffeine to recharge, and hopped on the metro to a different part of town to check out the Heydar Aliyev Center. Heydar Aliyev was a Soviet leader of Azerbaijan, and its second president after the Soviet collapse. His son is the current president of the country.

The Baku metro is an older Soviet metro that was opened in the late 1960s. I would have taken photos, but it’s forbidden to do so. The trains are the standard 1970s design of rolling stock that operates in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tbilisi, and Yerevan. Like the other Caucasian republics, the Baku Metro cars are renovated and repainted in colors different from the standard Russian blue and white exteriors and plain interiors. The stations themselves were a hybrid of Soviet metro design. They were smaller stations, generally of the caterpillar design favored in the 1950s-1970s, but mixed in elaborate mosaics like those of earlier Moscow Metro stops. Inside, the trains made the station announcements in Azerbaijani and English. A nice touch unique to the Baku Metro is that the noise that plays before a stop is different for each station. Each station has its own snippet of famous Azerbaijani music assigned to it. Like the Moscow Metro, police presence in the stations was high, and unlike the Moscow metro, each of the train cars had tens of cameras operating in them.

The Heydar Aliyev Center is a joint museum and concert hall space. We saw some interesting exhibits about the culture of Azerbaijan, the history of the Aliyev family, and a showcase of miniatures of the architectural highlights of the city. My favorite exhibit was a collection of three cars that had been used by Heydar Aliyev in his capacity as a leader of Azerbaijan. There was a Soviet ZIL limousine as well as two armored Mercedes W140 S-600s, once of which was a stretch Pullman.

I’ll take one of each, please.

From the Center, we went back to the center of the city for dinner at a great Lebanese restaurant, and then we went to see the waterfront and the city lit up at night, which we couldn’t due the night before due to the rain storms.

The next morning, Rebecca had to go off to her Azerbaijani classes and the archive, so I amused myself until she was free. I first went to the Fountain Square area to find some postcards, and then headed off to the post office to get some stamps. The Azerbaijani post office was nice. There was a kiosk to determine what kind of service you needed, which printed out a number. My number was immediately called to a desk, and the woman there sold me stamps, which I was then told to glue onto the postcards. She then stamped them and told me to put them in the box on the street, which I did.

After the post office, I strolled the streets and enjoyed the weather before getting some döner for lunch. Azerbaijan is very influenced by Turkish culture and history. Many of the foods are shared, and Azerbaijani itself is basically a dialect of Turkish. The döner hit the spot, and then I went along the waterfront to the carpet museum. Besides oil and caviar, the other main product of Azerbaijan is carpets. The museum is even in the shape of a carpet. Inside, there are all sorts of different carpets from Azerbaijan, and cool information on how all the different rugs are woven. There are even a few weaving stations set up in the museum, and I watched a woman making a carpet for a while. I don’t know how they do it. It seemed extraordinarily complicated, and I would find myself lost and frustrated very easily.

I have neither the motor skills nor the patience for this.

Sadly, the museum didn’t have any carpets of Soviet leaders, which are my favorite ones, but they did have some lovely socialist-realist carpets, one of which saluted the Baku oil industry. There was also a second oil industry carpet, and a portrait of the composer Shostakovich.

Carpets are probably my favorite socialist-realist medium.

From the carpet museum, I strolled back to the apartment and rested for a while as I had been walking a lot, and we had big plans for Monday night. The first plan was to meet with another former Fulbright ETA, who happened to be passing through Baku on a trip in the Caucasus with her friend. In the evening, we met up near the American Embassy and walked off to find dinner. The guards at the Embassy, rightly, were a little uneasy about Rebecca and I standing around and looking for two other people, but they quickly left us alone when they saw we were Americans and were meeting other Americans. We ended up walking to a restaurant near Rebecca’s apartment that specialized in meat. After dinner, we walked towards the Metro and split ways.

Rebecca had gotten us tickets to see the closing ceremonies for the Islamic Solidarity Games, which is like the Olympics for nations with large Islamic populations. Azerbaijan is technically a Muslim country, but they are very secular. Azeris eat pork and drink, but there are definitely very divided gendered norms in the country and some more conservative values. For example, women rarely drink or smoke in public, and Azeri men can been very forward or harassing towards women, especially foreigners.

Closing ceremony festivities.

To get to the closing ceremonies, we had to walk a long distance from the closest metro stop along areas flooded with police. We then went through security tighter than at airports with metal detectors and pat downs. We finally entered the stadium to catch athletes parading, speeches from the Vice President of Azerbaijan, who is also the wife of the President, and the head of the games committee. After the speeches, there was a concert of a number of Azerbaijani pop artists. Each artist was given two songs, and they seemed to grow in popularity. We saw three women, and left during the second guy we saw. Of the five acts, only one was actually good. One guy seemed to be an Azerbaijani Pitbull. He rapped and had the same outfits and swagger as Pitbull. Tired from the day, we left the stadium while the songs were still ongoing, and went home near 11:00PM.

The final morning, we slept in and then met up with Rikki and her friend for brunch at a Turkish café before seeing the waterfront a last time. To clarify my earlier point about Azerbaijani being a dialect of Turkish, Rikki spoke to the staff at the restaurant solely in Turkish. They understood her, but she had some difficulties understanding the responses in Azerbaijani. Rebecca mostly gets by in Azerbaijani, and when that fails, speaks English to people in the service industry. Like most ex-Soviet republics, I was able to get around in English or Russian depending on the generation of the people I was speaking to. There was still a good amount of Russian being spoken on the streets amongst the local population, and Rebecca said they often mix both Russian and Azerbaijani in every sentence.

The world of Soviet/ex-Soviet scholars is quite small.

After lunch, I grabbed the tings from the apartment and got a taxi back to the airport. I went up to the first taxi in the line, which was a 1995 Mercedes W202 C-Class. The driver spoke Russian and we agreed on the price. As we rode to the airport, he told me about his car and then asked how long I had been in the city, what I had seen, etc. He said that Baku is okay, but that the best parts of Azerbaijan are out in the mountains. He told me that I should come back and find him at the same taxi rank by the hotel, where he always waits. He said we can have him drive us around the country.

At the airport, I had no problems checking in for my flight or passing through customs. My flight back, though, was somewhat unpleasant. I had an empty seat next to me, and the aisle was occupied by a 60-ish Azeri man. He was clearly bored on the flight and at one point started to talk to me while my headphones were out around when I was getting something to drink. He said he was an actor at the Azerbaijan State Academic Drama Theatre. He then proceeded to show me photos of his roles over the years on his phone. He said he was traveling to Chelyabinsk for his friend’s birthday party and invited me to go there with him and to vacation with him in Altai later in the summer. When it was time to get off of the plane, he grabbed my backpack and carried it for me. He wouldn’t let me grab my own bag. While waiting to cross customs, he insisted on giving me his name and phone number. When I went to the immigration window, he blew a kiss at me and told me to call him. I handed my documents to the official and didn’t look back. I then ran away as fast as possible after being handed my documents.

He also told me some really weird stories on the plane. He said he liked the sportsman who became a present. I looked confused and he responded, “the one who met Gorbachev?” “You mean Reagan?” I asked. “He was an actor.” “Yes, him.” He then asked if I knew who killed JFK. I said ostensibly Lee Harvey Oswald. He response was that it was LBJ, because he wanted to become president. He then ranted about Marilyn Monroe, who was killed—it was made to look like a drug overdose—because of the secrets she knew from dating JFK. For these secrets, she had a secret meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev was on a boat, and Monroe entered the boat from below the waterline. There, she traded the secrets for Khrushchev’s weight in gold. It was a surreal experience.

After dropping my stuff off in my room, I did laundry before venturing out into Moscow while incredibly exhausted. It was Jean Louis’s last day in Moscow, so we had to go out and do the obligatory group photo by Red Square.

On Friday, I flew off on an adventure with some friends to see the city of Volgograd, which was known as Stalingrad during part of Soviet history. I have wanted to go there for a long time, especially since my cousin gave me a handmade, scale model of the famous Motherland Calls statue as a college graduation present. Studying German prisoners of war, I figured it was especially important that I go see the location of the bloodiest battle in history. It was at the Battle of Stalingrad that the course of the Second World War changed in the Eastern Front. It was a major victory for the Red Army, and it was the first one in which they took massive quantities of POWs.

Hero City Volgograd

On Friday afternoon, I headed off with Gustav and Linda from the dorms to meet Erin at Belorussky Train Station. From there, we took the Aeroexpress train to Sheremetyevo together. We easily and quickly printed our boarding passes and made it through security. Feeling peckish, we went to a Shokoladnitsa in the airport and got some food. The service was less than stellar. The table was dirty, and I had to ask the waiter twice to clean it. He still didn’t clean it, and only did so after we tried to flag down different waitresses in vain. When he did finally come to clean it, he left a giant pile of crumbs in front of me, and the others joked that it looked like he was going to push them onto my lap.

After eating, we walked to our gate. Boarding was annoyingly delayed without any announcement as to why or for how long. Eventually, we boarded the plane and pushed back from the gate mostly on time. The flight was relatively pleasant and only lasted about one hour and twenty minutes. Linda was dozing off at one point and tried to refuse the snack, but the flight attendants woke her and insisted that she take her fish sandwich. None of my traveling partners were enthused about the meal, though Gustav thought about taking Linda’s spare sandwich as an additional snack depending on his hunger later.

Back to the orange summer uniform, and with a St. George ribbon for Victory Day.

Volgograd is going to be a host city for the 2018 FIFA World Cup and it’s quite clear that a lot of infrastructural development in underway. When we landed, we taxied to a far part of the airport, surrounded by gravel access roads. We walked off of the plane and boarded a bus to the terminal. While we waited to depart, I asked one of the lovely Italians back in Moscow to sign me up for laundry on Monday night. I was barred from doing so on Thursday and the sheet would only be available after 6:00PM on Friday. Surrounded by a number of UAZ bukhanki, we rode down to the terminal. We exited at the old, Soviet Terminal A, but it looks like the brand new Terminal C is almost complete. They are in the process of paving new taxi ways and aprons towards the terminals.

Airport paving in the distance.

We then went into the baggage claim area, which like the Murmansk airport, only had a single toilet that we took turns waiting for. Exiting the terminal, I called a Yandex Taxi to take us to our hostel. We got to the car with a quoted price of about 350 rubles. The driver then spoke to me and asked me to cancel the ride so that he wouldn’t have to deal with the commission to Yandex, and then wanted 400 rubles from our group. Without many other options and not wanting to fight over $1.00, we quickly agreed to get in and ride off. He then took us across the city to the hostel and pointed a few things out along the way. At one point, he caught me looking off at a walled building with barbed wire in the distance. “Это зона,” he said (“It’s a prison” – literally, a zone). He then said that there were dachas next to it and that “it’s Russia.” He told us what we had to see in the city over the next few days. He also pointed out the jail when we drove past and laughed. I asked him if he knew anything about the POWs in the city and their role in reconstruction, and he said that they rebuilt the whole city, so I knew my research was off to a good start.

Eventually, we arrived at the very center of the city and where we had booked a room. Through Booking.com, we found a hostel called Hostel Like at Home. We had managed to get a room for four people in it. When we arrived, we were slightly confused because the address was an apartment in a building. I typed the number in the domophone and asked if it was the hostel, and they said that we had booked a room with them. They opened the front door of the building, told us to go up to the fourth floor, and greeted us at the apartment door. It was indeed a converted apartment of a formerly elite caliber. The apartment had four rooms, a kitchen, and a toilet and shower. Our room had a large bed, a sofa bed, and a bunk bed in it. The hosts, husband and wife Nikolai and Lilia, were very friendly and made us immediately feel at home. We set our things down, and they gave us some maps of the city and recommendations for dinner.

We walked out onto the street and at the bottom of our building was a very nice Georgian restaurant, where we decided to have dinner. The weather was a balmby 60 or so degrees, and after the snow of Moscow, it felt delightful. Indeed, on the 12th, I was walking to get lunch at the cafeteria in one archive. To do so, I have to cross an interior courtyard. It was snowing when I went to get lunch. Our waiter at the restaurant was fantastic and friendly, a nice change from the anger of the waiter at the airport café. We were also pleasantly surprised that there was the option to order khakhapuri with two eggs instead of the standard one for ten rubles more.

Perfection in food form.

After dinner, we walked back to the room with a stop to buy some water along the way. We then tried to figure out about bedding for the sofa bed, which Nikolai searched for and later gave us. With the bed pulled out, it was a tight squeeze in the room, but we each had a bed and it was fine.

We slept in a bit on Saturday and woke up to find breakfast waiting for us. There was cereal, yogurt, tea, coffee, bread, and butter. While eating, we befriended a Dutch backpacker who had been traveling around Russia by train. He was leaving Volgograd that day, but he gave us a few tips for what to see in the city. We eventually got our acts together and headed out to see the city.

Our apartment truly was in the center. We were near Lenina (generally the main road in any ex-Russian city that hasn’t been heavily renamed), the water, and the central eternal flame. When we walked to the eternal flame, we noticed a bunch of high school children who were performing an honor guard near it. They even did a changing of the guard with a slow march. From there, we popped down to see the riverbank. We saw a cool clock counting down to the opening of the World Cup, and got mobbed by Russian school children out on excursions.

Just a little over 365 days until the start.

We walked along the waterfront to the Stalingrad Battle panorama museum. Parked outside was a neat T-34 tank, which we took turns climbing. We then spent a few hours walking through the museum. It had a bunch of cool artifacts from the war, such as legendary Vasily Zaitsev’s Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle. Sadly, there wasn’t anything in the museum for me about POWs. Outside the museum, we walked around the samples of military technology and looked at the ruins of an old mill, which are preserved to show what the battle did to the buildings in the town.

The mill and a reproduction of the famous fountain that appears in numerous war photos.

After the museum, we headed off to find some lunch, which we did at a wok and sushi place, which wasn’t too bad. From there, we walked the last mile and a half along Lenina to Mamaev Kurgan, the park for the Motherland Calls statue. From the bottom, we walked up a series of steps that said “To Our Soviet Motherland – USSR!”

At the top of those steps was a walkway that led to a giant statue and fountain of a WWII soldier holding a grenade and a PPSh machine gun.

From him, we climbed more stairs with reliefs that had popular motivational slogans from the war. There was also patriotic war music playing, like the well known song “The Scared War,” which is the song that kicks off the Victory Day Parade in Moscow.

“Everything for the front. Everything for victory.”

Past more statues and reflecting ponds, we found the entrance to a building that housed an eternal flame and honor guard. On the façade of this building was a series of reliefs depicting Lenin, Red Army soldiers, and to my surprise, German POWs being taken captive. I couldn’t believe that.

“The fascist forces wanted to see the Volga. The Red Army gave them this ‘opportunity.'”

As we entered the hall with the eternal flame, we couldn’t believe our luck to catch the changing of the guard.

We watched from inside and then left when we thought it was done. We then went outside to head our way up the memorial complex, but turned when we heard footsteps getting louder. The soldiers march all the way up the complex and out the top of it.

We were glad to catch them coming out and then walked up to the base of the Mother Russia statue. Along the way, we had a tremendously sobering moment when we saw a sign asking visitors to keep off of the grass as it was a communal grave, which contains remains of 34,505 people.

“Keep off of the mass grave. There are 34,505 buried here.”

Seeing the monument in person was spectacular. We were barred from getting very close as the statue is slightly under renovation.

The Motherland Calls.

We then walked into the nearby chapel before walking down the hill and catching a trolleybus back to the hostel to relax a bit before dinner. We ended up getting food at a Russian restaurant that had a DJ, who curated a sweet soundtrack. We then walked to a local supermarket, where Erin and I bought some Russian beer, which we drank at the hostel before falling asleep.

The next morning, we got up and arranged our transit to the airport the following day with Nikolai. Our flight was to leave at 6:00AM, so we wanted to give them warning and ask about when we should order a cab. Nikolai took care of it all for us while we were out exploring. As we ate out breakfast, a new guest came to stay at the hostel. He was a French backpacker who had flown to Vladivistok and was making his way back to Moscow via train. For reasons we couldn’t understand, neither the French nor the Dutch backpackers spoke much Russian. The French guy mostly sat there as we planned our day. Nikolai seemed sad when we didn’t take him with us for the day, but we had planned to travel far out in the city that day, and there wouldn’t be space for him with us in the taxi.

From the hostel, we walked a few blocks to the basement of the Central Universal Store, or TsUM. Originally, in the basement, there was a Red Army field hospital. As the territory changed hands over the battle, it then became a Wehrmacht field hospital and headquarters of sorts. In this basement, General Field Marshall Friedrich von Paulus was captured by the Red Army. He was perhaps the most notorious German POW in Soviet hands, and Hitler was livid that Paulus allowed himself to be captured instead of killing himself. The museum was also great in that the woman working at the desk remembered us from the Panorama the day before and believed that we were all students. We also found out that photography, including flash photography (usually a huge no-no in Russian museums) was allowed at no extra charged. As we neared the end of the exhibit, one of the directors noticed us and gave us a brief private tour in English and then invited us to join along on the Russian tour, but we sadly had to decline to go off on more adventures.

Paulus being captured.

From the bunker museum, we walked towards the train station hoping to find a place for lunch. We quickly found a burger joint that was Chuck Norris themed. They even had Chuck Norris juice and ketchup and mustard bottles.

Chuck Norris branded everything.

After a quick walk around the train station, and a stop by the recreation of the famous fountain of children around an alligator, we called a Yandex taxi to take us about 45 minutes out in the city to a former German settlement called Sarepta. We got into the cab and I told the driver that I was surprised that he was willing to drive us so far. He said it was only 30 kilometers, which was nothing given that the city itself is 80 kilometers (50 miles) long. Along the way, he laughed when I asked him to turn up a currently popular Russian rap song on the radio called “Ice Melts Between Us.”

At the Sarepta museum, we got to go into exhibits in three buildings of a former German farming settlement. The first building, where we bought the tickets, was actually the last building. We were instructed to head off to a different one, which turned out to be a museum of mustard. Apparently, Volgograd is known for mustard oil, and we got to see how they traditionally extracted it with a candle and hand crank press. In the third building, we got a small view of what rooms looked like that people lived in in the community.

The Museum of Russian Mustard.

From the museum complex, we walked about five minutes to a bus stop to catch a marshrutka that would take us along the Volga-Don Canal and to the largest Lenin statue in the world. It was originally a giant statue of Stalin, which was turned into a Lenin statue during Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign.

World’s largest Lenin statue.

Along the statue, there was some sassy graffiti, such as one piece that said “Я жив – В.И. Ленин (I am alive – V.I. Lenin),” which was a play on the famous Soviet slogan “Ленин жил. Ленин жив. Ленин будет жить (Lenin Lived. Lenin is Living. Lenin Will Live.”

“I am living. – V.I. Lenin.”

At the bottom of the statue, there were steps leading to the Volga River. The water seemed to be unusually high and flooding some trees. We also saw a man drive up on a boat and potentially exchange some things and money with some youths. Basically, we may have witnessed a boat based drug deal. So that was fun.

From the Lenin statue, we walked along the river to see the main gate of the Volga-Don Canal, which was a massive Soviet canal project that was completed after the war and largely through the labor of German POWs. The gates were impressive, and as we neared them, we noticed that men were catching fish in the waters. One guy saw us and asked if we wanted to buy fish. I said that we couldn’t, that we had no way to prepare them. He answered that he would give us a bag, and it would be fine. I then explained that we had nowhere to cook the fish, and he let us go.

The entrance to the Volga-Don Canal.

From the Canal, we headed off towards a café that was built around a Yak-40 jet, and decided that it would be a good place to call a taxi back to the center. A driver somewhat quickly accepted the fare, but then I noticed that he wasn’t moving on the map for a long time. I called him and asked why he was taking so long. He said that he didn’t want to drive back to the center, that it was too far and for too little money. He told me that no one would want to drive that far for Yandex. My reply was, “then how did I get here in the first place?” Annoyed, I hung up on him and saw that he was refusing the cancel the order. I cancelled, filed a complaint against him in the system, and then got a different driver. Rather than wasting time again, I called him and asked if he would take us to the address. He seemed confused by my question. He said that he could see on the map that it was where we want to go and asked if we wanted to go somewhere else. Unlike the first driver, he paid attention to the address of the fare and didn’t mind driving us there. We then embarked on a forty minute ride of insanity and terror.

Russian taxi 101.

Our driver, while extremely friendly, drove like a rally driver in a beat up old Nissan station wagon. He was very gopnik, complete with a knockoff Adidas track jacket, and the standard Russian man sunglasses. The car smelled strongly of gasoline, and he weaved in and out of traffic. Once he started talking, he didn’t stop until we arrived at the hostel. At first, he started talking about the Mongol conquest of Russia when Erin and I said we were historians. He then started to talk about a friend who uses a metal detector to search for treasures in the fields, which led to a story about him finding and selling a coin from the era of Peter the Great. The driver then started to talk about some icon that his grandfather had given him. During this conversation, he almost drove us into a truck. He also narrowly avoided running over a large chunk of metal that had fallen off of a different car ahead of us. As he was talking about the icon, he mentioned something about the water of the Volga and quickly pulled off of the road and into a gas station. He then got something out of the trunk and poured it into the gas tank. I’m not sure if he was pulling in gas from a jerry can, as the fuel gauge read E the whole way, or if he was adding dry gas. Either he was supposed to bless his icon in the Volga, or there was water in his fuel. He spoke in a very confusing fashion, which wasn’t helped by the radio and open windows. We got back onto the road, and he then told us about how he had broken up with his girlfriend of five years. Mercifully, we arrived before we could die from his driving.

Exiting the taxi, we popped into a local blini restaurant for an early dinner. The shashlyk blini was depressingly bad. Gustav then headed back to relax while Erin, Linda, and I walked to the water and then into a bookstore. We then returned home where we sat and had tea until nightfall. We had decided to go back to Mamaev Kurgan at night to see it lit up. We took the tramvai there, which in Volgograd is like a miniature metro at times. In the center of the city, the tramvai runs underground and has stations reminiscent of the metro. And, without street traffic, the tramvai was able to go really fast.

Tramvai? Subway? Subvai?

We got out at Mamaev Kurgan and climbed our way up and got lots of photos at night. We also went up past the statue to see if the cemetery was lit up, which it wasn’t, so we turned back and walked back down.

On the way down, we noticed a woman wearing a very strange track suit. Actually, track suits were very popular in Volgograd. She had a green, knockoff Adidas track suit that was very tight. She decided to pair it with a pair of heels that only a stripper would wear. As we walked down, I got a sneak photo. Others were not as covert. One guy with his girlfriend took a photo with a flash. His girlfriend was laughing, and I told her that we had also taken photos. This caused her to burst out laughing to the point of tears.

We climbed down and took the tramvai back to the hostel. There, we had tea with Lilia and Nikolai in the kitchen. We told them about our day’s adventures, while the French guy awkwardly sat there looking at his phone and eating cereal without milk. Lilia asked if we had tried the mustard oil at Sarepta. When we said no, she pulled out a bottle and cut up some bread for us to taste it with. Nikolai reminded us many times that it was better with black bread, while we had to make do with French bread. We also told them that I was studying German prisoners of war, and they told me that they had built their building. Lilia also told me that there is a cemetery in the area that has a new monument and German graves, so it looks like I’ll have to come back to Volgograd. Nikolai then told us that we had to each wake up in 15 minute intervals, which was actually right. He made a joke that we wouldn’t all go in the shower that the same time, but that it was OK with him if we wanted to. He said we were more than welcome to try, but that he couldn’t imagine how we would all fit. Lilia then told him to stop teasing us.

Thus, at 3:00AM this morning, we took shifts waking and dressing before bidding Nikolai goodbye and heading off in the taxi. Our driver this morning was crazy. He laughed when those in the back seat tried to find their seatbelts and said they weren’t necessary, and that no one would get in trouble for not having them. He then drove like a maniac the whole way. At one straightaway, he accelerated up to 155kph, or 95mph, and took his hands off of the wheel to see if the car would track straight. The instrument cluster was also lit up like a Christmas tree. ABS? ESP? Those are for cowards. He almost crashed us into the back of a car that didn’t move over for us, and aggressively passed a series of other drivers. He then dropped us off at Terminal C, which was the wrong Terminal. We then walked over to the dilapidated, Soviet Terminal A, where we checked in. At check in, Gustav had a run in with the man putting on the baggage tags. The guy said that he would have to check his bag because he had a small wheeled carry on and a small backpack. I said that he was allowed to have a bag and a smaller second bag that’s a personal item. He then countered about the weight of Gustav’s bag, which was heavy due to his school books, but the issue was quickly resolved by the woman working at the check-in computer, who said he was going to Moscow and that it was fine for him to take the bag onboard.

The new terminal, which was still closed, at least for our flight.

Before passing through security, we had a breakfast, which was packed for us by Lilia. She had given each of us a juice box and a bear shaped treat that are filled and made for kids. We then made it through security and killed time before getting onto a bus to the plane. It was a little unclear which gate was for our plane, and no one seemed to work at the airport to tell us. The flight was uneventful, and we landed in Moscow without any issues. We got on a bus, walked through the airport, and ran to catch the 8:30 Aeroexpress train. I then went back and took a nap before wandering around Moscow with my adviser, but that is a story for another time.

May 9th, or Victory Day (День Победы, Den’ Pobedy), is a major Russian holiday at commemorates Soviet victory in World War Two in the European theater of war. The first Victory Parade was held in Moscow at Red Square on June 24, 1945. After that, though, Victory Day was not a holiday, and did not become so until 1965 and the 20th anniversary of the ending of WWII. During the Brezhnev era, the Soviet victory over fascism became a point of stability and self-worth for the Soviet government. It was under Brezhnev that the Cult of WWII became a phenomenon and part of Soviet society. Major parades on Victory Day, though, were reserved for large anniversaries of the date. Only four Victory Parades took place in the Soviet Union, in 1945, 1965, 1985, and 1990. The major military parades were saved for the anniversary of the October Revolution, which was celebrated on November 7th (when the Revolution took place, the Russians still used the Julian calendar; the Soviets switched the nation over to the Gregorian calendar). Under Putin, however, the Victory Day parade has become a staple, and the Cult of WWII has regained a prominent place in Russian society. As a fan of military technology and the stereotypical images of tanks and ICBMs rolling down Red Square, it was a dream come true to be in Moscow for Victory Day.

ICBM in downtown Moscow. No big deal.

Due to the importance of the event, a number of practices are held in the weeks leading up to the parade. One night after Taekwondo, Jean Louis found out about the practice, so we headed off to Red Square around 9:45PM in the cold and rain. We were able to stand near the Okhotnoy Ryad Metro entrance and see all of the tanks parked and ready to roll onto Red Square. As we stood under the rain, we heard the soldiers on Red Square shout “УРА” (Hooray) before the machines started up and rolled past us. It was absolutely unreal to stand meters away from moving tanks, missile launchers, and ICBMs. It’s one thing to see them in museums, but it’s completely different to feel the sidewalk shaking underfoot as the trundle past at speed.

A few days later, I managed to see another practice off of Tverskaya Ulitsa, one of the main roads in downtown Moscow. This practice was held earlier in the evening, or rather, I saw the technology roll by closer to 7:00PM. They would then wait outside of Red Square and would again drive onto Red Square after 10:00PM, once the soldiers had finished their marches. I went with two of my dorm neighbors, Gustav and Linda, and we were again very lucky to get right up to the barricade near the Mayakovskaya Metro stop. This repetition was even better because it was daylight. Because we were at the spot where the tanks turn off of the Garden Ring and onto Tverskaya, there were some gaps in the procession and differences in speed of the vehicles. Trying to catch up to the ones ahead, some of the tanks were clearly driving at full speed when they went past. You could see the damage they were doing to the pavement.

On Sunday morning, I had been having brunch with Jean Louis on the 8th floor. While we were cleaning up, we got the surprise of a lifetime with the practice for the aerial portion of the parade. Our dormitory is right under the flight path towards Red Square, and the planes were just overhead. The view from the kitchen window was perfect. I geeked out as I saw a number of really cool planes fly over, such as an Antonov An-124 Ruslan (the largest military transport plane in the world), and the Tupolev Tu-95 bomber. The Tu-95 is known as the Bear bomber according to NATO, and it is Russia’s equivalent to the B-52. It’s the USSR/Russia’s strategic long-range bomber that can drop nukes and conventional bombs as well as fire cruise missiles. Unlike the B-52, which is jet powered, the Tu-95 features 4 turbo-prop engines with 8 contra-rotating propellers.

A trio of Tu-95s.

It’s one of the fastest propeller driven aircraft and is also one of the loudest military aircraft. The noise of them flying overhead was deafening. You could hear them from really far off, and that must have been somewhat what it was like to live through the Blitz, hearing propeller bombers approaching from far off. The sound meant that nothing good could be coming. There was also a sweet flyover of various fighter jets and bombers, which were in great patterns. The final planes dropped smoke in the color of the Russian flag, which was great.

On Victory Day itself, I woke up at 6:30 so that I could leave the dorm at 7:00 to head off to Tverskaya, one of the main roads in Moscow to try to watch the military vehicles parade down the roads. The major ceremony takes place at Red Square, but only diplomats, veterans, and special guests can go to see the parade in person. It’s an invitation only event. Myself and a few others braved the cold weather and rain to head to the same spot on Tverskaya just past the Mayakovskaya Metro stop to catch the machinery roll by before parking off of Red Square. The official ceremony starts at 10:00AM. We figured we could see the stuff and then wait for the planes to fly over.

When we got there around 7:30, we spoke to a few cops and they said that the stuff had already gone by at around 7:00 if not earlier. While deliberating what to do, Jean Louis was briefly interview for some Russian TV channel. Slightly discouraged by the lack of tanks, we walked by foot in the direction of Red Square to see how close we could get. The closest, near the Teatralnaya Metro stop, didn’t give us views of anything. The others talked about maybe going to one particular spot, and I wasn’t sure what would or wouldn’t be visible from there.

I walked back to the dorm to have a quick chat with the security guards about going on the roof. The guy in the first building said that he didn’t have a key to the roof, and to ask the guys in the main building. He told me to tell him if the other guards had the key, because he also wanted to go on the roof to watch the planes fly over. So I went off to the main building and asked the guard there if he had a key to the roof so that we could watch the planes. He said that he didn’t have it, and that he himself had been searching for it for the same reason. I wished him a happy holiday, and he said he would unlock the main door for me to leave. We then stood there for a solid minute while he tried to unlock the door. Once again, I was reminded at how deadly every exit to the university potentially is.

On the street, I ran into an acquaintance named Anna. She said she was waiting for her friend Dasha, and that they were going to go to Tverskaya together to watch the tanks. I said that I had been told that they had already gone by, and she said that was crazy. By this time it was already nearing 9:00AM. She said that the first vehicles, such as the T-34 tank on a trailer (70+ year old tanks aren’t meant to drive miles down the roads of Moscow), were probably what had gone by.

The T-34 gets special treatment. It was the tank that won WWII, and the first to use sloped armor.

We then set off to the Mayakovskaya station to get a spot and wait for Dasha. When we got to the station, a cop was announcing on a megaphone that the tanks had already gone by, and he listed a few places for us to go to see them, once of which was where the others had gathered.

We hopped on the Metro and rode to the center, to a station where there are four stations together. It turns out that we could only exit from one of them, which means we had to walk through basically three others to get to the street. We exited at Arbatskaya and stood in a fairly thick crowd. By chance, another acquaintance, Dima, was there and saw me. He said hello and told us how to join up with the others, so we quickly walked off and wound up on a hill overlooking the exit of the Kremlin, right were the vehicles would leave the Kremlin and drive up and through the city.

Sadly, from that point it’s impossible to see the foot soldiers. The parade of vehicles was just as cool as when I saw the various repetitions. On one hand, the practices were better because I was closer to the vehicles, but it’s something else to see them rolling with the Kremlin walls in the background.

С Днём Победы! Happy Victory Day!

As soon as the tanks passed, the police made announcements for the crowd to disperse. Due to the poor weather, the planes had been cancelled. Some people were saying that it was the coldest Victory Day ever. While I’m not sure of that, I do know that it was indeed cold. On the 8th, it alternated between raining heavily and snowing. I thought that this was intentional. The Russians do something to the clouds to push them out of the sky and cause them to rain before and after the holiday so that the skies are clear on the holiday itself. They either didn’t do it, or it was too cold and the clouds were too saturated. The temperature on Victory Day ranged from the mid-30s to the mid-40s Fahrenheit, and it rained on and off for most of the day. The weather was evidently bad enough that they decided not to do the fly overs. Slightly dejected, we wandered off to get food. We wound up back by Pushkin Square, which was filled with a parade for various political parties including the Communist Party and one that was for the restoration of the monarchy.

Lenin Lived. Lenin Lives. Lenin Will Live.

I wound up getting a photo with some Communist pilots, who I think used to fly for Aeroflot.

With my new pilot friends.

After getting cut off a few times, we eventually wound up in a good cafeteria where we all chowed down and regained some energy. We then walked to the Hermitage Garden, where there was a smaller collection of Victory Day activities. There were a number of old GAZ Volga cars, and there was a Ural motorcycle that we could sit on. There was a concert of military music, and there was a special ceremony of thanks and recognition for a few veterans of WWII. There are still a few of them around, and they were proudly enjoying the day’s activities. From there, we walked back to RGGU to have tea and rest up for other activities.

To Berlin!

Around 7:15, Jean Louis asked if I wanted to get dinner with him. We walked to the store and got some booze and then grabbed some food from McDonald’s, which we ate in the 9th floor kitchen. Izaro was making herself pasta, and Étienne was sitting and having a cup of noodles. Jean Louis then invited him to the fireworks. Gustav also joined us, and we hopped in the metro to ride off to Park Pobedy, Victory Park. The show was supposed to start at 10:00, so we left before 9:00. When we changed stations at Kievskaya, we all piled into an overcrowded car for the one stop to Victory Park. In the station, we met up with Dima, and then we proceeded out and to the park. To get into the park we had to wait in line to go through metal detectors. The crowd was pretty tight getting through security, but once we were inside it was OK, as the park is huge. We then met up with the Italians and two Germans. At 10:00, the fireworks began and lasted for about ten or fifteen minutes.

This might be slightly better than the 4th of July.

Leaving the park was quite difficult. As soon as the fireworks ended, people rushed the exits. We went towards the exit, but all movement stopped pretty quickly. We stood unmoving for quite some time. We then tried to see if we could go out a different exit, but it had been blocked. We were essentially locked into the park by police barricades. Only after a while did they open the main barricade that was stopping us. We got shuffled and pushed towards the exit with the mob. We unfortunately lost two of our friends in the process. As we approached the entrance to the metro, the mob was bonkers. We were being crushed and pushed from every direction as everyone rushed to get down the stairs. Once a few steps into the metro entrance, however, the crowd dispersed and we were able to have some space to ourselves and make sure everyone was there to head home.

Packed metro. All of these people were exiting the station.

In total, Victory Day was absolutely fantastic. I fulfilled a dream of mine to be in Moscow on Victory Day, which is everything I had hoped it would be and more. I also walked 13 miles over the course of the day, so my body feels like one of the tanks rolled over me. And now I have to leave for the former Party Archive, where I will spend my day reading about POWs. Life is never dull as a WWII historian.